Bob Dylan performs some of his most controversial music in[+][-] 1979.

Sony Music’s Columbia Legacy imprint has been emptying its vaults of rare and unreleased Bob Dylan recordings for decades, giving listeners even greater insights into the work of the 2016 Nobel laureate than can be found on his 50+ album official discography. The Bootleg Series Volume 13: Trouble No More tackles perhaps the most controversial and obscure portion of Dylan’s career, the 1979-1981 period where he embraced evangelical Christianity, produced three highly polarizing albums, and performed with the fervor of a man possessed.

Trouble No More is available as a two-disc sampler or a deluxe box set that includes 8 CDs, a DVD and two hardcover printed volumes. The expanded edition features over 100 never-released tracks, including more than a dozen songs that never previously appeared on any album and many live performances from unreleased concert recordings. Like previous deluxe Dylan reissues, the deluxe edition doesn’t come cheap: it’s aimed at Dylan’s well-heeled older fans accustomed to picking through outtakes and bootlegs for the most fleeting traces of his genius.

Unlike The Basement Tapes (recorded in the mid-60s, compiled for the first time in a complete deluxe edition in 2014) or the legendary mid-60s sessions that produced Dylan’s trio of classics, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde (issued in a deluxe edition called The Cutting Edge in 2015, including a highly-limited 18-disc set priced at over $600), the material on Trouble No More is not viewed with much affection by most Dylan aficionados, and needless to say, holds limited appeal to younger listeners.

If you can see past the cultural baggage that is still piled up in front of this material nearly 40 years later, however, the new set contains a wealth of treasures that not only clarifies a misunderstood part of Dylan’s legacy, but elevates it to major status within his cataglog.

Slow Train Coming.

In 1979, Bob Dylan, at age 37, was already a legendary figure who had changed the face of American popular music forever. He was viewed by the rising Baby Boomers as the voice of their generation, a world-weary rebel skeptical of authority, who famously proclaimed “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

But by the late 70s, Dylan, like many of his fellow 60s icons, was looking a bit shopworn. His 1978 album Street Legal was full of opaque lyrics and baroque production. Critics complained that the subsequent tour, documented on Bob Dylan: Live at Budokan, made him look like a glib Vegas showman. The gas was still running, but the pilot light had gone out.

An unlikely spark triggered the explosion that followed. According to the liner notes to Trouble No More, an audience member at one of the shows in late 1978 handed Dylan a small silver cross. A few days later, in a hotel in Tucson, Dylan had a divine revelation, a textbook “road to Damascus” moment. In the weeks and months that followed, he embraced a strain of fundamentalist Christianity popularized by the apocalyptic writing of Hal Lindsey (The Late, Great Planet Earth).

Dylan’s conversion shocked his fans – not necessarily because he had turned to spiritual pursuits, since many of his generation were on the same journey, but because Dylan, who is Jewish, became enraptured with literally the last thing you’d expect from Bob Dylan: literalism. Overnight, all the cryptic ambiguity and restless questioning that characterized his persona was replaced by certainty. Not only did you need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, you needed the man who makes the weather. And if you didn’t accept that, you could – and surely would – go to hell.

Ain’t No Man Righteous.

Dylan’s embrace of evangelical Christianity alienated many of his longtime fans without winning him many new ones. The first of his born-again records, 1979’s Slow Train Coming, peaked at #3 on the Billboard charts, went Platinum in the US and netted Dylan his first Grammy Award, but the followups Saved (1980) and Shot of Love (1981) were two of his weakest sellers to date, the harbinger of a long-term decline in sales of his new studio releases that persisted for the rest of the century.

That’s ironic because, as Trouble No More amply documents, the music he created during this phase is as vital and well-crafted as anything he did since his mid-60s creative peak. He assembled a band capable of playing fiery gospel, sinewy blues and gutbucket rock and roll. Night after night, in venues much smaller than rock superstar of Dylan’s stature would ever consider playing, they pummeled audiences with some of the hardest, tightest performances of Dylan’s career.

The live recordings on Trouble No More make it easier to appreciate Dylan’s musicianship, which was not obvious on the albums and certainly not the focus of attention from contemporary critics. His voice is strong and relatively melodic throughout, and the passion he brings to the Christian material recalls the apocalyptic urgency of his secular protest songs like “The Times, They Are A-Changin’” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” In fact, from the vantage point of 2018, we can see his work in this era as part of his long-term project to meld African-American blues music with the flinty Scots-Irish Appalachian folk tradition, in this case by tapping into the fervent – and, yes, literal – spirituality that both communities celebrate in song.

Sony Music

Trouble No More: 1979-1981 is Volume 13 of the Bob Dylan[+][-] Bootleg Series from Columbia Legacy (Sony)

Shot of Love.

Trouble No More isn’t for everyone. A lot of 60s lefties who’d invested heavily in Dylan’s mystique felt betrayed by his turn toward unforgiving religiosity. If that wound still aches, this set won’t make things any better. The songs are what they are, and the messages in them don’t yield to a more generous interpretation, no matter how hot the band makes them sound on stage.

That said, this era of Dylan’s career is now more than 35 years in the past, and he not only returned to secular music by 1983, but has more or less renounced this whole episode in some of his Delphic conversations with the press. If you can manage, as the Bard says, to “not take it so personal,” the music on this set leaves a lot to appreciate. Whether you need the 2-disc set or the extended deluxe version is between you and your conscience.